Doctor Who?

Yes, I'm back. Sorry I haven't been keeping up with the blog recently. Christmas upset my routine.

In the intervening time, you have been working on your Hamlet essays and I am looking forward to seeing all your drafts by the end of this week. And we have been getting our teeth into some ideas about modernism and especially modernist poetry in preparation for studying Auden.

The main points I've been hoping to get across to are:

1. The important role of ambiguity in poetry, and especially perhaps in modernist poetry - in some ways establishing a new relationship between reader, author and text - where the reader plays a more active part in interpretation and the writer may withhold information that might assist with interpretation.

2. The function of poetry as a form of expressive art - in which sound, shape, colour, texture, etc. are an important part of the effect - and perhaps in modern poetry particular which is often less narrative, more expressive in nature. (And remember poetry NOT intended to be studied in class....)

3. The various characteristics of modernist poetry - listed on the sheet I gave you after we had tried to work them out from looking at Prufrock and various other poems.

4. Some of the ways in which poets in the 20th century have worked with conventional poetic form but in unconventional ways - e.g. using enjambement between stanzas, half rhyme, broken metres, etc, (remember the snake in the box?) whilst also using strong expressive approaches to sound - alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, etc.

And so on to Auden....

Dr S